In 2014, Indonesia, a sprawling archipelagic nation of 250 million people, began phasing in one of the world’s largest single-payer health-care systems. Two and a half years later, its government guarantees comprehensive health insurance for 165 million citizens and residents, with plans to expand coverage to the entire population by 2019.

This report, requested by the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation of the Department of Health and Human Services (ASPE), analyzes competition in the Health Insurance Marketplaces created by the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in six states (Alaska, Florida, Kansas, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas). The purpose of the study was to focus on a few states that had one or more potential indicators of “insufficient competition”—such as few insurers offering plans, low enrollment, high premiums, inadequately informed consumers, or sparsely populated rural areas—and try to understand how competition was working in these markets and what might be done to make it work better.The report describes the findings for each selected state, discusses common themes across the states, and provides some potential remedies to improve competition. Following is a brief summary of why these states were chosen and what the field researchers found:

Medical error is the third leading cause of death in the U.S., killing more than 250,000 people each year. But the problem is not being tracked widely, according to an analysis published Tuesday in the BMJ.

When a medical error results in death, the delivery of care issue that led to the death should be tracked, said Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine professor, Martin Makary and research fellow Michael Daniel in their analysis. But the problem is not currently reported explicitly as a cause of death to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or on death certificates. And it is not easily tracked through the diagnostic and procedural coding system used by hospitals and other providers.

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The only problem with the president’s lament is its chronology. The failure occurred much earlier, in 2009 and 2010, when Mr. Obama still enjoyed the support of a Democratic-led Congress he needed to move boldly. Despite campaigning for a national infrastructure bank in 2008, he didn’t insist on including it in the 2009 stimulus bill. He didn’t even publicly raise the matter until September 2010, when the midterm election was looming and the chance of enacting new legislation was effectively nil.

This was part of a broader strategic decision to move from his initial focus on averting economic disaster to other concerns—notably, the Affordable Care Act and carbon cap-and-trade legislation. Whatever balance of benefits and opportunity costs the focus on health care may have entailed, the months the House spent in 2009 on an environmental bill that never had a chance in the Senate were a total loss. The exodus of white working-class voters from the Democratic Party contributed to this loss of focus on core economic concerns.

This Visualizing Health Policy infographic looks at eligibility and coverage trends in employer-sponsored health insurance. Since 2000, the share of workers covered by employers’ health benefits at both offering and nonoffering firms has dropped to 56%, with the biggest decrease among employees working for small firms (3-199 workers). Among people younger than 65 years, those with lower incomes continued to be less likely to have coverage from an employer-sponsored health plan, as has been the trend since 1999. In 2015, larger firms were more likely than smaller ones to offer health benefits, as were organizations with more higher-wage employees, fewer lower-wage employees, and fewer workers 26 years or younger. Most large employers offered coverage to spouses and other dependents, while fewer than half of these firms offered coverage to same-sex or opposite-sex domestic partners. Few firms took action in 2015 in response to the Affordable Care Act’s employer mandate, including changing some jobs from part-time to full-time so employees would be eligible for coverage.